Lesson resources your future self can actually find

Teachers plan lessons out of a hundred scattered sources — an activity from one site, a reading from another, a YouTube video that explains photosynthesis better than the textbook — and the collection system is usually a groaning bookmarks bar plus a doc of pasted links. Next year, when the same unit comes around, half of it is unfindable. Marqly turns that scatter into a resource library that organizes itself: one-click saves, automatic AI tagging on Pro, and boards you can hand to students as a simple web page on any plan.

If you are comparing tools rather than evaluating one, we publish the full seven-tool comparison — including where Marqly loses, and including Diigo’s free plan for verified educators — in the best bookmark managers for teachers guide. Buying for a department or a whole school? That is a different question with different answers; see the schools and districts comparison.

Collect resources without building a filing system

The reason bookmark folders fail teachers is workload math: filing takes time, and planning already consumes evenings. In Marqly, saving is a single toolbar click, and on Pro the AI applies tags on its own — the reading gets tagged, the lab activity gets tagged, the assessment idea gets tagged, and you never stop to decide which folder something belongs in. On the free plan you tag manually, which is still one field rather than a folder taxonomy. During a planning binge with a dozen tabs open, the tab saver banks all of them at once.

Highlighting adds precision. When only one section of a long article is classroom-ready, select it, pick a highlight color, and leave yourself a note like “starter activity, period 3 level.” Highlights stay on the page when you return and sync to your library, so the usable part of every resource is already marked when you build the lesson.

YouTube videos, with the transcript doing the work

Video is half of modern lesson material, and Marqly treats it seriously. On every YouTube watch page you get an AI card: a streaming summary with key sections for fast previewing — no more watching twelve minutes to learn a video is wrong for your class — plus a playback-synced transcript with one-click copy, which is exactly what you need for pulling quotes into a worksheet or preparing questions in advance. On Pro, chatting with a YouTube video lets you ask things like “what examples does this use for natural selection?” and get answers from the transcript itself.

The bookmark button Marqly adds to YouTube’s action row saves the video with its transcript attached. That transforms retrieval later: semantic search reads transcripts, so next spring you can search “the video where erosion is demonstrated with a sandbox” and find it — even though the title says nothing of the kind.

Share a resource board with students

Marqly boards group links and highlights, and a board maps naturally to a unit: readings, videos, and practice resources for the cell-biology unit, all in one place. The classroom payoff is public board sharing — a board becomes a public web page that students open with nothing but the link. No accounts, no invitations, no forgotten passwords, no age-gated signup problem. Drop the link in your LMS and the curated resource list is live. Sharing is view-only, so the list stays exactly as you built it. And because the page is public, keep anything private — rosters, graded material — off shared boards.

Find last year’s resource again

The quiet tragedy of teaching materials is rediscovery: you had the perfect simulation for this exact lesson two years ago. Marqly’s semantic search matches meaning across titles, page content, highlights, and video transcripts, so half-memories are enough — “interactive where students balance a food web” gets there without a title or URL. AI summaries on saved articles also make short work of the annual pile of curriculum reading you saved and never triaged.

Getting started

Install the Marqly extension on Chrome, Edge, Firefox, or Safari. Export the bookmarks bar you’ve been nursing for years as an HTML file — every major browser exports this format — and import it; Pocket and Raindrop.io imports are supported as well, and for Pocket it’s the list.csv inside the export archive that imports rather than the HTML preview file. On Pro, AI tagging can then organize the whole pile in one pass; on the free plan your existing tags come across and nothing new is added. Two documented limits worth knowing before you import: folder structure flattens to at most two board levels, and imported items take the import date rather than their original save date. Either way, the decade of accumulated “TEACHING STUFF” folders becomes a searchable library without sacrificing a summer afternoon to sorting. From there, build a board per unit as you plan, and share the link when the unit starts.

Resources also turn up outside planning hours — on your phone during a staff meeting, on a home laptop on Sunday night. The iOS app, the Android app and the web app all write to the same library as the extension, so what gets saved never depends on which device you were holding when you found it.

Sign up free, no card required, at app.marqly.com.

Who this isn’t for

Marqly is not an LMS and doesn’t pretend toward one: there are no assignments, no grading, no rosters, no student progress tracking, and no way for students to submit anything back through a board. It also has no SSO or SCIM, no per-board permissions, and no mobile or extension access to team workspaces — so a district IT team that requires centralized identity management will need to look elsewhere, and Marqly Teams is a shared workspace for a department rather than a managed school deployment. Personal libraries stay individual; collaboration happens in the Teams workspace, which is web only. If you need courseware, this isn’t it. If you need the resource-collection layer underneath your teaching to stop leaking, it fits exactly there — and if you’re still choosing, start with the teacher comparison.